On June 3, at 6:13 p.m., President Trump was evidently in a bad mood. He had heard or read one too many times that he uses bad grammar and eccentric capitalization. He tweeted: After having written ...

Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest ...

Don’t pretend that you’re above the fray. It’s a good bet that you’ve argued with someone recently over grammar or spelling or regionalisms or some other aspect of language. Perhaps you asserted the ...

TEXTUALISM in law and prescriptivism in usage are, in some ways, estranged cousins. It is fitting, then, that Antonin Scalia, textualism’s most prominent advocate, and Bryan Garner, the face of modern ...

ALLAMA Muhammad Iqbal’s poetic genius has been acknowledged far and wide. But in his own days, especially early in his literary career, a constant campaign was run to mock and disparage him. Opponents ...

From grammar rules to everyday slang, debates over descriptivism and prescriptivism reveal how we balance authority with the way people really speak. What is language, why do we use it, and how did it ...